Re: Translating The GIMP

[Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld dkuug dk>]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 06:40:51PM +0200, Sven Neumann wrote:
> 
> Do you have any good arguments against UTF-8 encoded po-files?
> 

Yes, they are a nuisance. As late as yesterday I had problems with
UTF-8 po-files. It was a new textdomain from mandrakesoft, 
for mandrakesoft online, and it was stated as utf-8 but recode
could not handle it, there were some undefined errors in it.
Fortunately I just had to translate everything anew and then I could manually
set the charset to iso-8859-1. I have had the same problem with some
kde po-files, and this was coming from other translators that 
was not aware of the utf-8 encoding, but just thought that
it was iso-8859-1 and edited it as such. 

I am quite experienced as a translator and have done a lot of work on gnome
po files, and even for me utf-8 is a pain in the a** for the time being.
For less experienced translators it will just confuse them evenmore.

Don't get me wrong - I am all for ISO 10646, all my i18n work has been
based on that standard for the last 10 years, and I am even a coeditor
of the ISO 10646 standard. And I am very officially for using utf-8
everywhere, both the Internet policies RFC and the POSIX recommendations
have my name written all over them.

It is just not time yet, and it is not needed as gettext will automatically
do the conversion via brunos iconv().

Kind regards
Keld